AFP reports that Google has warned Australia that if they pass certain a new copyright law that it will set the country back to “the pre-Internet era.” Google’s senior counsel, Andrew McLaughlin, told the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, “If such advanced permission was required [to index pages], the internet would promptly grind to a halt.” I believe the issue here is that Australia wants Google to get copyright owners to opt in to having their content indexed, archived and cached, as opposed to opting out via a robots.txt file. Australia is not alone here; Belgium newspapers are fighting Google over similar copyright issues. This all just amazes me, seriously.

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